A Bilingual RSS Feed: Why I Still Keep It Around

gookkis.com has two separate RSS feeds: /rss.xml for Indonesian content and /en/rss.xml for English content, both generated straight from the same getBlogPosts() function used to render the blog pages — so there’s no separate logic I need to keep in sync manually. I hear a lot of people say RSS stopped mattering once Google Reader died years ago. I don’t agree, especially for a small blog like this one, and I have a more concrete reason than just “I like RSS.”

A few months ago I checked the Nginx access logs out of curiosity, just to see requests to /rss.xml — the volume is tiny compared to regular page traffic, but the pattern is interesting: requests come in regularly, roughly the same time each day, from a handful of IPs/user-agents that clearly look like reader apps (NetNewsWire, a Feedly bot, that kind of thing), not someone opening a browser once and never coming back. RSS traffic is small, but loyal — a different character from social media traffic, which spikes and disappears.

Serious readers still use RSS readers

People who genuinely follow technical writing usually already have a reader and prefer it over social media notifications that get lost to an algorithm or buried under other posts. A feed doesn’t demand their attention through an annoying notification badge — they open their reader whenever they want, and read what they actually want to read.

The cost is close to zero

Astro already makes it easy to generate a feed from the same content collection used to render the pages, via the @astrojs/rss helper. Barely any added maintenance — just one rss.xml.js file per locale calling a function that already exists and mapping title, description, pubDate, and link. No new logic to write, no extra database, no separate service that can go down. Add a new post, and the feed updates automatically on the next build — exactly like the blog page does.

Splitting by language matters, and it’s not just tidiness

If I merged both languages into one feed, English-only readers would get notified about Indonesian posts they can’t read, and vice versa. That’s not just annoying — it makes them more likely to unsubscribe entirely rather than filter it themselves. Separate feeds mean every reader only gets what’s actually relevant to them — the trade-off is just one extra config file, which is cheap next to the benefit.

RSS doesn’t need an algorithm deciding who sees my posts. Doesn’t need an account. Can’t be deprioritized by some third-party platform that suddenly changes its content-distribution policy. For a personal blog that I fully control, that fits the whole philosophy of this site: simple, self-owned, not dependent on anyone’s algorithm mood.